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This paper presents insights from two interview studies with the aim of shedding light on the learning potential of studying abroad in an area where English is used as a lingua franca. The majority of previous research on study abroad focuses on students' experiences of studying abroad in target-language regions, for example learners of English studying abroad in English-speaking countries. To date, the learning potential of spending time in English as a lingua franca (ELF) contexts remains an under-researched area. The present paper draws on two separate interview studies that have been conducted with five Turkish and five Swiss study abroad students that stayed in different European ELF contexts as part of their studies at higher education institutions. The data suggests that even though the participants still partially adhere to native speaker norms, they also discuss a number of characteristics of English as a lingua franca study abroad (ELFSA) contexts that they deem conducive to learning English and enhancing their plurilingual competences.

The purpose of this paper is to describe and reflect on the position of what are called second additional languages in the language teaching landscape of South African schools. This landscape is crowded, with different South African languages vying for attention. Amidst efforts to increase the number of learners who offer an African language as one of the subjects in the school exit examination, initiatives to introduce languages like Mandarin and Swahili put additional pressure on an already over-burdened system. The paper considers this crowded landscape and the implications for the teaching of German, French and Mandarin at secondary school level. These are only three of at least fifteen languages offered as second additional languages. This paper focuses on these three because they are most widely taught in mainstream schools. The policies and practices as well as the problems with teaching these languages are described, focusing on the types of learner who will choose these languages, the approach to teaching them and possible actions that could ensure the continued offering of second additional languages at primary and secondary schools.

This conceptual research analyses the historical development of the German concept of "Bildung" to the Danish "dannelse." The starting point is J.G. Fichte's 1808 "Addresses to the German Nation," in which "Bildung" is analyzed as a key concept. The paper illustrates the influence Fichte had on N.F.S. Grundtvig, the "father of modern Denmark," with important adaptations based on English liberties and Nordic mythology. Grundtvig's "dannelse" is then analyzed based on his 1832 "milestone" work, "Nordic Mythology." The paper finds that "Bildung" and "dannelse" can be considered parallel concepts of similarity in their shared emphasis on the mother-tongue as a "living language," and focus on social cohesion. However, "Bildung" and "dannelse" can also be characterized as concepts of difference, in that: 1) "dannelse" popularized "Bildung," meaning that it was not just for the academic bourgeoisie, but the entire "folk"; 2) freedom of expression is fundamental to "dannelse," in contrast to the stability of will and moral order in "Bildung;" 3) in "dannelse," national unity is expanded to a wider circle of belonging, the whole of humankind; 4) Nordic mythology is a social cohesive in "dannelse," to contrast Fichte's more rational conception of "Bildung." Written by a British author for an English-speaking readership, this research does not feign to be more than a prefatory glance at two rich and complex concepts. However, in shedding light on the historical development of "Bildung" to "dannelse," it aspires to edge readers closer toward a shared conceptual understanding or, more aptly, to better understand misunderstandings.

The aim of this study is to reveal the effect of foreign language learning on mother tongue use. Case study design, one of the qualitative research designs, was used in the study. In order to keep the sample large, 70 pre-service teachers were selected using simple random sampling method among the 4th year undergraduate students studying in three different foreign language education departments in 2016-2017. The research data were analysed using deductive analysis method. As a result of the research, the pre-service teachers who participated in the research think that language learning is a necessity and that individuals learn languages out of necessity. The pre-service teachers state that interest in the target language is an important condition for language learning, that if there is no interest, the language cannot be learnt, and that belonging to a common language family increases interest in the language and facilitates language learning. The desire to communicate with other individuals in the world, to improve oneself, to learn the culture of the target language and to live abroad are among the reasons for learning a foreign language. Learning the education system and sound harmony of the target language and economic concerns are among the reasons for language learning. The pre-service teachers who participated in the study stated that they had the most difficulty in learning basic language skills in foreign language learning and that they made comparisons with their mother tongue while learning a foreign language. The pre-service teachers who participated in the research stated that they pay attention to the use of the mother tongue while learning a foreign language; they pay attention to the use of the mother tongue while learning a foreign language because they benefit from the love of the mother tongue and translations. [This research was presented as a summary paper at the RESSCONGRESS International Educational Sciences Social Sciences Symposium held in Bandirma.]

Since its release, ChatGPT has raised concerns in many teaching contexts given its threat to reliably evaluating learners' knowledge and skills. Within task-based pedagogy, however, this technology opens new avenues for second language (L2) teaching when adopting the technology as a writing buddy. Our study explores how ChatGPT as a model impacts the revision process of advanced L2 writers of German. Twenty-two university students participated in a two-week classroom-based intervention, producing two summaries of popular-scientific texts in L2 German. After writing a first draft, they compared their summaries with texts produced by ChatGPT (3.5) and revised, where necessary, their own text. In this paper, we analyze all students' rubrics-based ratings of the ChatGPT models and present data of six focus students' screen-recorded revision processes that we coded for revision focus, source, and success. Results reveal students' growing awareness of characteristics of ChatGPT-output, such as linguistic accuracy and fluency, as well as its flaws in content provision. Revision data demonstrate that students skillfully made use of the models to improve their own texts. Our study provides evidence that using ChatGPT as models in writing and revision processes can stimulate higher-order thinking in the revision process of advanced L2 students.

The main goal of this paper is to suggest a combination of data analyses -- notably generalized additive models, time-series clustering methodology, visual methods for significance testing and qualitative analyses -- that relate to Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST). To this end, we report on findings from a larger project conducted in a bilingual (pre)primary school in Switzerland, aiming to elucidate the complex ways that L2 English development emerges over time in 45 children who received German/English bilingual instruction over a period of eight years (age 5-12) in combination with emerging extracurricular exposure to English. The results reveal that increased extracurricular activities in English are particularly noticeable during periods of rapid development, but the effects seem temporally limited to the end stages of testing and strongly hinge on the cluster in question (i.e., learners with trajectorial similarities). We relate the findings to the "authenticity gap" between English inside and outside of school, as clusters who perceive a discrepancy between in- and out-of-school encounters with English also show rapid development that is characterized by increased English exposure during extracurricular activities. Methodological implications of adopting non-linear models, which can model complex dynamic relationships in order to better reconcile generalizability, variability, and individuality, are discussed.

This paper explores ways to integrate social justice issues pertaining to decolonization and anti-racism into the world language classroom at all levels of instruction. It describes tasks designed to introduce language learners briefly to German colonialism, raise awareness of colonial legacies in contemporary German-speaking societies, and familiarize students with current decolonization initiatives. By engaging students with the complex diversity of German-speaking societies, the tasks provide examples for diversifying and decolonizing the language curriculum while fostering collaboration, critical thinking, and transcultural sensitivity. The examples highlight approaches to anti-racist pedagogies and ways of incorporating social justice practices across all levels of instruction and applicable to all languages.

This paper gives an account of the history of foreign language values in Sweden from the seventeenth century to the present. The paper is informed by sociocultural standpoints on language and language learning according to which language is a dynamic tool that is appropriated by individuals to achieve particular purposes, and that dialogically creates and renews our social world(s). Since the sixteenth century, three languages (German, French and English) have been taught in Sweden as foreign languages during particular eras. In this paper, we explore how language value can be understood as a system that evolves over time as a result of triggers such as power, trade and personal benefits. The impact of these variables on Swedish society's efforts to invest in learning a particular language during specific eras is critically examined from the perspectives of nested systems.

Purpose: This paper analyses and classifies currently available English- and German-language measurement instruments for assessing economic literacy. It shows the content-related focuses and gaps of the extracted test instruments, the cognitive level of demand that characterises the instruments, the technical forms of implementation, and the extent to which the lifeworld contexts of test participants were considered. Method: The PSYNDEX, ERIC, German Education Index, and GESIS databases were systematically reviewed, and measurement instruments were examined based on four perspectives of analysis: economic subject dimension, learning psychology, assessment formats and technical design, and authenticity. Findings: Knowledge tests differ substantially from each other. Rather than representing all domains of the subject of economics equally, test instruments usually measure only one domain at a time. The focus of test instruments is on the retrieval of declarative knowledge. Measurement instruments were developed for adults and young people in equal parts. While some test instruments are related to the real world, authentic assessments are an exception.

By investigating the first thirty minutes of ten initial student group meetings (cf. Rampazzo & Aranha, 2019), this study explores the interactional resources that participants display during online talk-ininteraction. Multimodal Conversation Analysis is applied to the data consisting of "Gesprächsanalytisches Transkriptionssystem 2" (GAT2) transcriptions of recorded Zoom video conferences. Virtual Exchange (VE), also referred to as Collaborative Online International Learning (COIL), is a method of intercultural online learning in which groups of learners collaborate with partners from another culture or geographical area in an authentic and immersive setting. Despite the collaborative and immersive nature of virtual exchanges, microanalytic studies regarding interaction in this field are still underrepresented (Dooly, 2017). This is also and particularly true for the concept of interactional competence (IC) (Kramsch, 1986) which has hardly been considered in VE research so far. IC is a competence model that comprises interlocutors' interactional resources such as turn-taking, repair, sequence-organization, multimodal resources and other. This paper depicts the interactional strategies that EFL students adopt in online video team meetings. Further, it argues that some L2 IC features, such as turn-taking and multilingual resources, come with particular dynamics and characteristics in a VE context and provides examples for these practices.

At conceptual and linguistic levels of cognition, events are said to be represented in terms of abstract categories, for example, the sentence "Jackie cut the bagel with a knife" encodes the categories Agent (i.e., "Jackie") and Patient (i.e., "the bagel"). In this paper, we ask whether entities such as "the knife" are also represented in terms of such a category (often labeled "Instrument") and, if so, whether this category has a prototype structure. We hypothesized the Proto-instrument is a "tool": a physical object manipulated by an intentional agent to affect a change in another individual or object. To test this, we asked speakers of English, Dutch, and German to complete an event description task and a sentence acceptability judgment task in which events were viewed with more or less prototypical instruments. We found broad similarities in how English, Dutch, and German partition the semantic space of instrumental events, suggesting there is a shared concept of the Instrument category. However, there was no evidence to support the specific hypothesis that tools are the core of the Instrument category--instead, our results suggest the most prototypical Instrument is the direct extension of an intentional agent. This paper supports theoretical frameworks where thematic roles are analyzed in terms of prototypes and suggests new avenues of research on how instrumental category structure differs across linguistic and conceptual domains.

This paper examines current practices that embrace the union between foreign language (L2) teaching and translation in higher education (HE). The rejection of monolingualism and prescriptive principles in favour of bi-, multi-, or plurilingualism; a diversified interdisciplinarity; new sociocultural realities characterised by greater international mobility; different needs and challenges in foreign language teaching; and an openness of translation studies, are only some of the reasons why the link between both areas remains pertinent. However, while the advocacy of integrating the use of translation in language teaching seems to be gaining steady ground in the last decade, specific ways of introducing translation into the L2 curriculum are not always clear. This paper discusses issues related to the design and implementation of a module that would tackle L2 learning while serving as an exploratory course on translation within a degree in languages in HE. The discussion aims to add to the debate on practical issues by explaining the rationale of the module, as well as any difficulties prior to designing the module, and those encountered in the implementation phase.

In this paper, we discuss the teaching effects of augmented reality (AR) technology in German instruction. We conducted one prestudy and three formal studies on German learners in China's mainland and Taiwan region. In the formal studies, a total of 120 students participated in the survey, allowing us to compare the differences in interest in learning between AR picture books and traditional picture books. A total of 114 students took part in the survey, which enabled us to compare the contribution of AR picture books to teaching when students' satisfaction and German proficiency were different. To improve satisfaction, 514 students participated in the survey regarding the influence of the interactive narrative design effect and peer learning on satisfaction with using AR picture books. The results suggest that when learning German with AR picture books, satisfaction is the key construct that determines students' learning states.

Students' self-efficacy is a crucial factor in learning foreign/second language. Although a growing body of literature has drawn attention to the self-efficacy in various fields, very few studies have addressed this issue in the field of foreign language and especially German learning. The purpose of this paper was to develop a reliable and valid tool for measuring self-efficacy beliefs of German learners. A total of 205 students (154 Female and 51 Male) studying in the German language education department participated in the study. After the data collection, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were performed to determine the validity and reliability of the scale. The Cronbach Alpha value of the developed scale was found to be 0.928, which is quite high. The explained variance value of the factors was found to be 62.943, which indicates a high validity. As a result of the analysis, a 23-item and 3- dimensional scale was developed. In conclusion, the developed scale is a valid and reliable tool for measuring language learning performance, linguistic skills, and learning confidence in the language learning process in the context of self-efficacy belief.

The construct of psychological flow bridges several areas of second language learning interest, including motivation, investment, self-efficacy, and autonomy. Flow, characterized by intense focus on an enjoyable activity that is at once challenging and accessible, creates conditions that have been linked to learning. Research interest in flow has grown, but the L2 research remains scarce and exploratory. This paper, which uses a two-study format, proposes and tests a new category coding scheme designed to explain which activities generate language-class flow. In Study A, third- and fourth-semester learners of Spanish, French, Italian, and German (N = 82) described their most flow-generating language-class experiences on an online questionnaire. In Study B, first- through fourth-semester students of Spanish (N = 588) did the same. The responses were coded to one category in each of four contrasting category pairs. Parallel analyses were conducted for each study, and within each study counts and chi-square tests were performed separately on each category pair. The results of both studies showed statistically significant contrasts within all four category pairs, and revealed that student-centered, open-ended, authentic, and non-competitive activities were more likely to generate flow than their opposites (i.e., teacher-centered, closed-ended, inauthentic, and competitive activities). Pedagogical implications and directions for future research are discussed based on these results.

The present study, conducted with the phenomenology method, a qualitative research design, aimed to determine the awareness of pre-service Turkish language teachers about the catchphrases printed on t-shirts that individuals notice or do not notice in daily life or do not pay much attention even if when they notice them. The study sample included 39 volunteering pre-service teachers (19 males and 20 females), attending the department of Turkish language education during the 2018-2019 academic year. The sample was determined with the convenience sampling method. An interview form that included open-ended questions and a questionnaire that aimed to determine participant demographics were applied to the sample. Furthermore, t-shirt texts in several foreign languages were determined by the author and the pre-service teachers were asked whether they knew the Turkish translations of these texts and whether they preferred foreign language or Turkish texts. Descriptive analysis was conducted on the responses of the pre-service teachers. Since these responses were considered important, direct quotes were included in this paper. The study findings demonstrated that 69% of the pre-service Turkish language teachers did not care about the texts on the t-shirts they purchased and prioritized the model of the t-shirts. Since this was a non-negligible rate, it was suggested that the study would contribute to the literature and raise awareness.

Swiss Vocational Education and Training (VET) is based on national legislation which was introduced in the 1930s and renewed in the 1960s (as well as in the 1970s and in 2002). At first, the goal of the national VET legislation was to further Vocational Education and Training in order to support small and medium enterprises; however, later, it also included industry and services and has more recently grown to support the learners themselves. The 1963 national legislation and the following implementation acts in the cantons were decisive in shaping the Swiss VET system from a historical and comparative perspective. We argue that still today we do not have a unified, national system of education, but rather e cantonal modes of education and also of VET. However, the cantonal actors--with a specific focus on Ticino, Geneva, and Zurich--argue with similar justifications, when it comes to the reform of VET. Nevertheless, within this national legal framework, the cantons adopt rather different solutions. The result is that different (language specific) regional pathways of VET were established, based on various education and training regimes. In this research paper, we aim to concentrate on the years from 1950 to 1970, a period that turns out to be particularly significant for the development of Swiss VET. We focus our research on the introduction of the Vocational Training Act in 1963 and look in detail at the extent to which the cantons developed their corresponding implementation acts from the perspectives of different motives and logics.

Connections between linguistic heterogeneity, educational choices and (family) biographies are complex and ever shifting. With this paper, my aim is to explore the question how social spaces are constructed by multilingual families in migration societies and how they situate social spaces 'in between', thereby challenging both binary and national logics and creating "third spaces." Especially in view of national educational institutions, family decisions on language transmission and use are reflected upon and at times re-evaluated. Analysis of family interviews with German migrants in Norway shows how both continuity and change are relevant for the parents as they try to produce an uninterrupted family biography but at the same time need to be open to adaptations to new situations. Expectations, language ideologies and perspectives that transcend one's own family spaces gain relevance while (national) institutions may call for changes in language regimes and practices.

Families that live in a new environment after having fled or migrated go through transformation processes that are connected to various challenges and possibilities. The focus of this paper is on negotiations of language policies in family biographies and family language practices, comparing cases of migrant families who arrived to Switzerland in different legal contexts of migration. The article addresses how these transnational families negotiate the meaning of (family) languages against the background of hegemonic language and migration policies. Questions of how these policies are experienced and dealt with and in what ways they do enable or disable possibilities for action are addressed using a qualitative analysis of narrative family interviews and participant observations in transnational families that now live in German-speaking Switzerland. On the basis of the analyses of interview transcriptions and field notes, I show how families deal with experiences of social and educational inequalities in the context of transnational pathways of education and how these are negotiated in the families. Language learning appears not only as an (un)available possibility, but it also requires one to return to the status of a student. At the same time, it is accompanied by a deep struggle for identity and belonging.

Within discourses on education and transnationalism, much importance has been given to language, both for the educational success of migrants and their transition into the labor market. Among the many perspectives on multilingualism, there is a growing body of research on language brokering. In contrast to professional interpreting, this is often associated with interpreting without formal qualifications or payment in mostly informal settings. However, language brokering is embedded in complex social structures, and students who interpret often act within complex power relations. In our article, we address experiences with education-related language brokering. While focusing on the perspectives of the students, we will address the roles they take during language brokering activities between different actors and the power relations they experience. Our data were collected as part of an ethnographic research project which aimed to explore the experiences of refugee students following their arrival in Austria and during the adjustment period in their new sociolinguistic and educational context. Empirically, the article is based on a data set of small stories and reflections about language brokering. The analysis was carried out through contrastive comparisons between different cases. The paper will conclude with suggestions on the introduction of critical language brokering practices and policies in educational institutions.

In order to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, many schools have been closed for several months as of March 2020 in Germany. The unplanned and rapid shift to distance learning formats has led to fears that extensive learning deficits will be created and educational inequality will be further exacerbated. This paper, therefore, investigates the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on spelling skills (capitalisation, sounds and letters, separate and compound spelling and punctuation) of students in German-speaking countries. For this purpose, we use granular learning process data from an online learning platform for spelling competences with over 1 million solved exercise sets. We compare successful completion of exercise sets before the pandemic and after the first wave of the pandemic and estimate personal competence by a Rasch model. The result shows a loss of competence in 2020 and an increase in inequality in some grade levels and spelling domains. A linear model cannot confirm an overarching loss of competence.

Since the emergence of online live text commentaries on football games in the late 1990s, the genre has undergone continuous change. While linguistic research on the genre of live text commentaries emphasizes its novelty, the genre has existed in football for at least 20 years. However, diachronic studies still lack. This paper presents a corpus linguistic analysis of genre and register-specific features of German live text commentaries from 2003 until 2020. Using quantitative methods, it focuses on the distribution of linguistic features on different linguistic (i.e. syntactical, lexical, graphemic etc.) levels over time. It is shown that various markers, which signal a colloquial register and emulate orality in the written mode, decrease, leading to a more impersonal way of reporting. Moreover, markers of individual perspective decrease in favor of a neutralistic stance. Thus, the evolution of live text commentaries can be described as a process of standardization.

Football stadiums have traditionally been named after local sites (e.g. "Goodison Park," Everton FC) or regions ("Ruhrstadion," VfL Bochum). As big business takes increasing precedence in decision making in football at large (e.g. associations and leagues, regarding fixtures, media coverage, kick-off times, player transfers, etc.) and within individual football clubs (e.g. regarding kits and sponsorship), such toponyms are more and more being replaced by company or product names (e.g. "bet365 Stadium," Stoke City). In this paper, we will consider corporate renamings from the German Bundesliga, the English Premier League and the French Ligue 1 and particularly fan reactions to controversial, badly received corporate renamings. As revealed by earlier studies, in our data here we also find the discourse and practices of the fans celebrating local identification with their city or region, often with the stadiums constituting the homestead of a tradition. Where corporate stadium renamings are badly received, this discourse clashes with the discourse of big business and thus a number of tensions are revealed. More specifically, in fans' reactions to controversial corporate stadium renamings, we find a number of recurrent themes -- for example, concerning consequences to fans' identity to the club; in managing (anticipated) humorous retorts from rivals consequent from the stadium renaming; in resisting, but also feeling resigned to, financial pressures in selling the stadium name; etc. -- some of them across our three national contexts and others specific to one national context.

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While research using behavioural methods has repeatedly shown that generic masculines in German come with a male bias, computational methods only entered this area of research very recently. The present paper shows that some assumptions made by these recent computational studies – treating genericity as an inflectional function and computing a vector for generic usage strongly correlated with the grammatical masculine – are not without issue, and offers the use of semantic instance vectors as a possible solution to these issues. Beyond this methodological improvement, the present paper finds that generic masculines are indeed semantically more similar to specific masculines than to specific feminines – results that are in line with findings by the recent computational studies and the majority of previous behavioural studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents regulated varieties of German in their national (DACH) variants. These include, above all, Leichte Sprache, Einfache Sprache, Klarsprache, Plain Language or bürgernahe Sprache. The individual language varieties are developed for diverse target groups and a common denominator that connects the addressees is their ability, which is limited for various reasons, to perceive and understand the standard form of the German language. The target group of the restricted language varieties can also include GFL learners for whom the German language in its standard variants poses a linguistic challenge in the initial phase of learning. At the same time, there is often a considerable need, especially among adult language learners, to read, listen to and understand factual, practical or fictional texts. The paper gives examples from teaching practice of how the need for less barrier-free communication can be met through a targeted, learner-oriented use of the simplified language variant in GFL lessons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, two syntactic configurations are considered that involve V-to-C movement in present-day German: Verb Second in run-of-the-mill declarative clauses and Verb Second in non-assertive embedded contexts. Along the lines of the cartographic approach and on the basis of syntactic and semantic evidence, it is proposed that in both constructs, the finite verb targets neither Force° nor the head of any other projection hosting a moved constituent in its specifier, but, rather, that it moves into the lowest head in the extended CP layer, namely Fin°. As a result of this, (at least) two types of verb raising to Fin° are to be postulated in this language: one that is triggered by discourse/information structure (V21) and one that results from mechanical movement to C elicited by an otherwise lacking lexicalization of the relevant left-peripheral head (V22). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the impact of givenness on phrasal stress assignment in German. It has been observed for English that nuclear stress is rejected on given elements that are part of the focused material if another focused word is available to bear nuclear stress. It is shown that the same effect applies to German. There are various proposals of constraints that militate against prosodic prominence on given elements. The present paper reviews these proposals and argues in favor of a constraint that is restricted to banning nuclear stress on given elements, but not phrasal stress in general. The argument is based on the observation for German that phrasal stress commonly occurs on pre-focal given constituents and may as well be present in post-focal position. The paper offers an analysis in the framework of Optimality Theory that captures the aforementioned stress rejection effect as well as the variability observed with regard to post-nuclear phrasal stress positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Connectives are a central means for creating a coherent discourse. The relationships between specific connectives, coherence relations and syntactic relations are complex for children to acquire. In this paper, we systematically compare the use of clause-initial connectives in written narratives by German-speaking children in fourth grade (10-year-olds, N = 32) and adults (N = 52). The overall use of connectives, the types of syntactic relations and coherence relations expressed and the connective types used as well as the relationships between syntactic relations, coherence relations and connective types are analysed. The results show that the groups expressed coherence relations with connectives equally often. Additive relations were the most frequent in both groups, but the children expressed temporal relations more often than the adults, who showed a larger diversity in the types of coherence relations. There was no difference in the overall use of subordination and coordination, but the adults expressed temporal relations more frequently with subordination. The children used adverbs to a greater extent than the adults. The connective da 'then' played an important role in the children's expression of temporal relations, whereas the adults used a wider variety of different connectives to express different types of temporal relations. The results suggest that children in the fourth grade have not yet fully acquired an adultlike use of connectives in written narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Meaning in life is multidimensional. It encompasses different qualities of meaning, such as meaningfulness, crisis of meaning, or existential indifference, as well as the sources from which people draw meaning, or purpose. For both research and practice, it is of high value to know not only the extent of meaningfulness, or its absence, but also its sources. How do these relate to meaningfulness and mental health? Are they accessible to people of different sociodemographic and economic backgrounds alike? For therapeutic and counseling practice, knowledge of experiences and sources of meaning is needed to support a clearer self-understanding in patients or clients and to encourage them to make authentic life choices. The Meaning and Purpose Scales (MAPS) presented here enable researchers and practitioners to gain insights into these dimensions of meaning in life, and, with only 23 items, to do so in a short time. Methods: Using five independent and two follow-up samples with a total N of 7,500, this paper examined the MAPS' internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and convergent, divergent, criterion, factorial, and predictive validity. Results: Principal axis factoring identified two meaning scales, Meaningfulness and Crisis of Meaning, and five purpose scales, Sustainability, Faith, Security, Community, and Personal Growth. The scales proved consistent, stable over four weeks and two months, and valid in multiple respects. In a representative German population sample, Personal Growth, Sustainability, and Community exhibited large, Faith and Security medium positive relationships with Meaningfulness, whereas Crisis of Meaning showed small to moderate negative correlations. Meaningfulness was positively, and Crisis of Meaning negatively predicted by age, partnership, parenthood, and religious affiliation. Financial hardship correlated positively with Crisis of Meaning and negatively with Meaningfulness, Community, and Personal Growth. Meaningfulness and Crisis of Meaning explained 21%, the sources of purpose 6% of additional variance in general mental distress (PHQ-4), beyond sociodemographics. Except for Faith (unrelated), all sources exhibited moderate negative correlations with the PHQ-4. Conclusion: As this series of studies demonstrates, the MAPS provide a highly economic and valid assessment of two qualities of meaning, Meaningfulness and Crisis of Meaning, and five sources of purpose: Sustainability, Faith, Security, Community, and Personal Growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Merels (also called Nine Men's Morris) comprises a family of traditional board games with ancient roots. Between medieval and modern times, merels saw an interesting onomasiological shift: Several European languages took up a new name for the game. This new name is sometimes claimed to have originated in German, but the details surrounding this naming practice are still unclear. There are mainly two German groups of names for this game, the older names based on the number 9 (Neunstein, Neunten Stein, Neunermal etc.) and the younger based on the German word for "mill" (Mühle, Mühlspiel, Mühleziehen etc.). Relying on philological evidence (partly pulled from lexicographical data) this paper outlines the evolution of German terms for merels, focusing on the naming practices from the 15th to 17th century. Possible motivations of the name Mühle are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study focuses on German word-initial consonant clusters and asks whether feature-based phonotactic preferences correlate with patterns of type and token frequencies in present-day usage. The corpus-based analyses are based on a comprehensive list of such clusters, representing current usage, and on a number of feature-based phonotactic preferences. Correlating the variables by means of a correlation analysis and a regression analysis leads to a number of observations relevant to the general topic of featural-segmental structures versus usage. First, out of eighteen correlations between (raw and logarithmic) type and token frequencies, and preferred feature patterns, only one significant correlation was found. Second, a regression analysis led to similar results: out of thirteen variables tested, only two contribute to logarithmic type and token frequencies. Only a limited set of cluster properties investigated in the present paper constitutes a relevant predictor of frequency measures. The study thus demonstrates, in accordance with other recent evidence, that preferred phonetic/phonological structures and their usage frequency constitute two separate domains for which distributions may not have to coincide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses lexical borrowings from German into Czech. It is a continuation of our previous paper which deals with German-Czech language contact in Central Europe (Zeman 2021). Due to the longstanding coexistence of both the Czech and German/Austrian ethnics, lots of German/Austrian loan-words became domesticated in the Czech. A significant language contact area in Central Europe is the contact area which is based on the former centre of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. From this contact area, a remarkable territory emerged in Vienna that was particularly affected by the influence of Czech on German. Although there has been a high degree of inter-national mixing at various stages in history, there was never any real harm done to the essence of either of the two languages. A fascinating aspect is the parallel changes in pronunciation in both languages, for example, in vowel sounds and diphthongs. Today it is generally accepted that, to make these sound changes, both languages had to develop similar internal expectations and that these developed in parallel. Aim is a short description of phonological and morphological adaptation of the German loan words in south Moravian variety. The paper enabled to confirm that the phonological and morphological structures of German loan words in south Moravian variety are more differentiated than those of German. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The town of Križevci in north-western Croatia is located in a region where agriculture is one of the main economic activities. Historically, it is the former Military Frontier established by the Habsburgs in the 16th century to ward off the westward encroaching Ottomans. The presence of the Austrian army in the Military Frontier led to lively German-Croatian language contact, since German was not only the language of command, but was also used as the official language of administration. The dominance of German in the public life of the Military Frontier favored the adoption of many German loanwords into Croatian and played a significant role in the development of Croatian agricultural terminology at the beginning of the 20th century. Professional texts from the agricultural scientific journal “Gospodarska smotra”, which was published between 1909 and 1919, form the template for the research corpus for the following paper. In particular, it was researched how the German agricultural terms are embedded in the Croatian text and which adaptation processes had an effect on the borrowing and integration into Croatian. It was established that when German technical terms were adopted into Croatian, various forms of loan creations were used, with German technical term compounds being replaced by various forms of attributive compounds. Furthermore, many text passages from the research corpus contain reflections and arguments by their authors on the concept of technical language in general and thus offer a valuable source for sociolinguistic and technical language follow-up research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper deals with the use of anche ("also") by German heritage speakers of Italian ("IHSs"). Previous research showed that anche and its German counterpart auch share many features but also display language-specific characteristics. According to previous research on bilingualism, heritage speakers show cross-linguistic influence ("CLI") when a linguistic phenomenon is at the syntax–pragmatics interface and there is a partial overlap in the two languages at stake. Therefore, we expect the use of anche in IHSs to be influenced by CLI. By analysing data from a semi-spontaneous corpus, we investigate the production of anche in order to understand which factors shape the grammar of the IHSs. Our results indicate that a subset of IHSs uses anche in the same way as in homeland Italian. The other informants display CLI effects of different types: on the one hand, they have two positions in the clausal structure for anche dedicated to different syntactic–pragmatic contexts, as in German, and they overextend the use of anche as a modal particle. On the other hand, the intonational properties of anche are not affected by CLI. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents a report on the implementation of the educational project Teaching the neighbours' language from kindergarten to the end of education - the key to communication in the Euroregion Pomerania cofinanced by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) under the Interreg VA Cooperation Program Mecklenburg-Vorpommern/Brandenburg/Poland. 24 educational institutions in Poland and 33 educational institutions in Germany took part in the project. 3,771 children and 821 teachers and kindergarten educators participated in project events. The number of lessons conducted during the project was over 30,000. In addition to school education, the project covered numerous meetings of Polish and German children and youth, workshops for teachers, educational forums for parents and others. The project developed curricula for German as a language of the neighbours at all educational stages and in all types of Polish schools, as well as numerous multimedia teaching materials, such as educational games, worksheets, educational films, etc. This paper describes the project, its theoretical and practical foundations and its results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper addresses a discourse particle that typically appears in conceptually oral / colloquial interaction and instantiates one of many different functions of the lexical element so (lit. ‘so, this way’) in Present-Day German. In contrast to the modal adverb so and just as some of its other polysemous counterparts, this element appears to be utterly desemanticized and non-referential, thereby modifying the meaning of the sentence at a very abstract level. On the basis of its distributional properties, its semantic contribution to the host utterance, as well as of independent assumptions on the notion of modality, it is contended that this so is to be categorized as an interrogative modal particle whose primary role lies in managing the Common Ground in non-monologic contexts such that the speaker requires the addressee to fill a gap in their knowledge of a given situation with the additional implication that the relevant piece of information does not have to be exhaustive. The aim of this paper is not to provide a comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon, but rather to make a theoretical proposal regarding the status of this element and thereby stimulate the discussion on the defining features of modal particles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The present study aimed at the translation and cross-cultural adaptation of six PROMIS® pediatric self- and proxy- item banks and short forms to universal German: anxiety (ANX), anger (ANG), depressive symptoms (DEP), Fatigue (FAT), pain interference (P) and peer relationships (PR). Methods: Using standardized methodology approved by the PROMIS Statistical Center and in line with recommendations of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) PRO Translation Task Force, two translators for each German-speaking country (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland) commented on and rated the translation difficulty and provided forward translations, followed by a review and reconciliation phase. An independent translator performed back translations, which were reviewed and harmonized. The items were tested in cognitive interviews with 58 children and adolescents from Germany (16), Austria (22), and Switzerland (20) for the self-report and 42 parents and other caregivers (Germany (12), Austria (17), and Switzerland (13)) for the proxy-report. Results: Translators rated the translation difficulty of most items (95%) as easy or feasible. Pretesting showed that items of the universal German version were understood as they were intended, as only 14 out of 82 items of the self-report and 15 out of 82 items of the proxy-report versions required minor rewording. However, on average German translators rated the items more difficult to translate (M = 1.5, SD = 0.20) than the Austrian (M = 1.3, SD = 0.16) and the Swiss translators (M = 1.2, SD = 0.14) on a three-point Likert scale. Conclusions: The translated German short forms are ready for use by researchers and clinicians (https://www.healthmeasures.net/search-view-measures). Plain English summary: A multitude of questionnaires exist, which are not comparable due to different questions or no available translations. PROMIS is an initiative, which was funded by the National Institute of Health in the US, to build better, i.e., more precise and efficient questionnaires, which can be used and compared worldwide. The PROMIS questionnaires include paper-and-pencil short forms and computerized adaptive tests. So far numerous PROMIS surveys have been created using advanced methodologies. They can be used by health care professionals to assess different aspects of health and compare the results internationally. To allow for international comparability of studies using those questionnaires, they need to be translated. This study reports the thorough translation process of the US-American PROMIS® questionnaires measuring anxiety, anger, depressive symptoms, fatigue, pain interference, and peer relationships in children and adolescents into German. The translation included researchers, children, and parents from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland to ensure that the final German version is fully and equally well understood in all of those German-speaking countries. The article describes the translation process, so that the user can understand the translations and use them in an informed way. The translated German questionnaires are ready for use by researchers and clinicians. (https://www.healthmeasures.net/search-view-measures). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper extends the analysis of subjectivity in Japanese ideophones given by Kawahara (2020) to German ideophones and in doing so proposes an alternative analysis of this subjectivity. Whereas Kawahara (2020) argues that the subjectivity in ideophones arises due to their indeterminate and varying meaning, this analysis instead proposes that ideophones are subjective due to their iconicity and that iconicity itself is inherently subjective due to individuals' differing perceptions of how iconic forms map to real-world referents. In this approach, the subjectivity in ideophones is modelled using the judge index introduced by Lasersohn (2005), alongside a perceptual operator derived from the epistemic alternatives used in the analysis of epistemic modals given by Stephenson (2007). Specifically, the perceptual operator provides a set of worlds, which are compatible with the judge's perception in a given world and at a given time, and in which the iconic relation holds. This iconic meaning component of the ideophone is furthermore separated from its conventionalised meaning component, with the latter contributing meaning in the same manner as arbitrary items in the same grammatical category. For example, the conventionalised meaning component of an adverbial ideophone functions as a modifier of events. This separation of meaning components is shown to provide a partial explanation for the varying at-issue status in ideophones as discussed in Barnes et al. (2022). The final section of the paper also demonstrates how this analysis of subjectivity in iconicity can be applied to further examples of iconicity in spoken language such as iconic enrichments in quotations and vocal gestures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]